The splash effect at the bottom that uses 150 particles looks awesome! As for the water fall itself, that uses way too many particles lol. You could probably get decent results with a lot less and perhaps even using plasma...

Didn't slow down for me, looked pretty cool. I can see why this wouldn't be practical for in-game use though. Maybe a scrolling sprite with a Warp effect for the waterfall itself, but still using plasma?

15,000 particles is about equivalent to 3750 sprites in terms of rendering muscle, so it is going to be slow for a lot of people. Often you can achieve a similar effect with fewer particles by reducing the rate and increasing the particle size.

(Not a very efficient waterfall, but I do need objects to interact with the particles. I'm eventually planning to have a swarm of objects chased through it, encountering some resistance and pushing the blobs of water aside.)

[quote="Mort":nuoqtudi]Is there an inbuilt reason that particles are more efficient than sprites to render?[/quote:nuoqtudi]DirectX can draw a particle from a single vertex, but a sprite requires four. So the data to transfer to the GPU is about a quarter that of sprites.

It's only if you enable certain options like particle rotation, then it has to draw them like sprites... it can texture particles with one vertex just fine and it barely affects performance from my own profiling. Davo can tell you more about which options go to sprite-style rendering.